A bug, booting up and a huge forum migration

Sorry for the lack of updates - I catched a flu for a few days, was in pre-christmas online-shop hell (where you get at least 30 orders per day) and was working on the move to the new boards.
Time for an update, right?

1. A bug!

It seems I found a bug in the shop system I am using which triggered an email to everyone who registered at the shop for the US Pyra preorder that the product is NOW available... sorry about that!
While we're close, preorder is not yet happening (I stick to my word and wait for the prototype )

The two who actually managed to order it will get a refund for now.

Sorry again - I didn't know of that bug before, but I'll make sure to not trigger it again.
So the next mail you'll get from the shop regarding preorders will be the REAL one!

2. Pre-Pre-Order limited PCBs

All Pre-Pre-Order PCBs (numbered and signed) have been shipped and are on the way to you.
Not all will arrive before christmas I guess, but maybe some of you might get a nice present

Well, not fully yet, but almost, but more on the software after a little hardware info!

Nikolaus spent the last week working with the prototype PCBs.
12 out of 17 he tested (one is currently lying at GC) boot up so far, so 5 need to be checked.

Don't worry about that failure rate, that's normal for a preproduction run.
A preproduction run is used to find out where you need to tweak the building process to lower the failure rate.

The failed ones will be analyzed to find out why they failed.
Could be the placement of the parts is not accurate enough, could be there is too much or too little solder paste, could be the soldering temperature and time can be optimized.

For example, if random contacts below the OMAP5 are bridged on multiple boards, it could be too much solder paste.
If it's always the same contacts that are bridged, it could mean that the OMAP5 itself needs some tweak in the placement.

These are only a few examples, the full process is a lot more complex, but I think you know what I'm getting at

So these five PCBs will be analyzed and reworked afterwards.

Okay, that's it for the hardware part, now onto the software part

Nikolaus has been working on wiring all the hardware parts together in the software (which means: creating a machine file and bootloader).
The machine file basically tells the system what hardware is where.
The devboard, for example, only had one SD-Card slot where we booted from. The prototype has 3 SD Card slots, so the software needs to know about it.
Otherwise, the bootloader can't find the kernel, for example, as it might be looking at the wrong place.
Also, the Palmas (power chip) disables all hardware it doesn't need as default (to save power), so if it doesn't know the system needs the SD Card slot, it shuts off the power and the kernel can't find any rootfs.

This is all stuff that needs to be implemented - once that's setup, booting in the OS will be a breeze!

So far, Nikolaus is almost finished with that low-level stuff. The system boots up the kernel, but the rootfs cannot be loaded yet. Everything else works! Once that last little thing has been implemented, we're ready to boot the OS.

Oh, and Nikolaus has also worked a bit on the anti-tearing driver for the rotation. He hasn't tested it yet, but that will also happen soon.

4. The case!

The case is still coming along well. The big moulds have all been done, the small part moulds (shoulder buttons, etc.) are currently being created.
Since there's now christmas holidays coming along, not much will happen anymore until mid of January.
Therefore, my visit is now planned (pretty much fix this time!) around 21st - 28th of January 2016.
The PCBs should all boot up and work fine until then, so it won't only be a mechanical test, we should be able to really boot the fully assembled unit up then as well!

5. A huge forum merge

Almost everyone at the boards hates the new IPB4 (me as well), as it's very slow and partly inconvenient to use (WYSIWYG-Stuff).

So we're moving to a new forum system (XenForo) which is a LOT lighter and faster, has quite a few useful new features I already love and I'm currently working on setting it up.

Additionally, the old gp32x.de boards will be fully merged into it (the user profiles will also be merged) as well as the temporary OpenHandhelds boards (which were created when gp32x.de had a few weeks of downtime) and the file archive will be integrated as well.

It's a huge merge, but I'm almost finished now (after using tons of different regular expressions during the last few days).
Seriously, IPB is a huge mess in my opinion - gp32x.de went from IPB2 to IPB3 as well, and I found at least 8 different ways that quotes worked! It seems IPB has constantly changed the way quotes work but never updated that in the posts, they just let the forum software handle it... it's a mess.

But I've got it almost fully done, only a couple of posts should have quote errors and no content has been lost!

I will start the merge with the OpenPandora boards on December 23rd. These forums will close down for one or two days and then the fully merged forums will arise anew!

That will be a vast ressource for looking up everything regarding OpenSource handhelds.

All good news. I'm actually extremely surprised at how smooth things are going, especially getting the kernel to boot first try: Nikolaus has done an amazing job and deserves some major praise, that was not an easy puzzle for him to solve.

Phew, I'm glad the bug turned up in your shop software rather than the hardware! (And the flu bug; glad you are better now!)

I guess there's still a lot to be tested as kernel modules start to get loaded and tested, but getting the kernel loaded it certainly a good start. And only having 5 failures out of a first build of 12 tested so far is a very good result in my experience. Awesome news that Nikolaus is getting some work done on fixing the tearing. I took a look at the bug in the bug tracker, but didn't find a definition for all of the acronyms, not really understand how the signals could get read from the driver code, so decided I'd leave it to someone with more direct access to a devboard.

The internal NAND/eMMC chip shares the same interface with the internal SD card slot (if SD card is in internal slot, then eMMC chip will remain unused). It can either be "3 SD card slots" or "1 eMMC and 2 SD slots".

It has not been decided yet. Prices at ordering time (and possibly, power consumption, I forget) will dictate what parts are ordered.

As I understand it technically, the microSD card will use some of the same lines as the eMMC into the SoC, so there's no way to use both at the same time unless there's some way to electrically alternate between them, although losing the root fs mount intermittently is probably not a good way to run a stable system.